At Once Let Me Confide To The Impatient Reader
That The Whole Alhambra, By Which He Must Understand A Citadel, And
Almost A City, Since It Could, If It Never Did, Hold Twenty Thousand
People Within Its Walls, Is Only Historically And Not Artistically More
Moorish Than The Alcazar At Seville.
Far nobler and more beautiful than
its Arabic decorativeness in tinted stucco is the palace begun by
Charles V., after a design in the spirit of the supreme hour of the
Italian Renaissance.
It is not a ruin in its long arrest, and one hears
with hopeful sympathy that the Spanish king means some day to complete
it. To be sure, the world is, perhaps, already full enough of royal
palaces, but since they return sooner or later to the people whose
pockets they come out of, one must be willing to have this palace
completed as the architect imagined it.
We were followed into the Moorish palace by the music of three blind
minstrels who began to tune their guitars as soon as they felt us: see
us they could not. Then presently we were in the famous Court of the
Lions, where a group of those beasts, at once archaic and puerile in
conception, sustained the basin of a fountain in the midst of a graveled
court arabesqued and honeycombed round with the wonted ornamentation of
the Moors.
The place was disappointing to the boy in me who had once passed so much
of his leisure there, and had made it all marble and gold. The floor is
not only gravel, and the lions are not only more like sheep, but the
environing architecture and decoration are of a faded prettiness which
cannot bear comparison with the fresh rougeing, equally Moorish, of the
Alcazar at Seville. Was this indeed the place where the Abencerrages
were brought in from supper one by one and beheaded into the fountain at
the behest of their royal host? Was it here that the haughty Don Juan de
Vera, coming to demand for the Catholic kings the arrears of tribute due
them from the Moor, "paused to regard its celebrated fountain" and "fell
into discourse with the Moorish courtiers on certain mysteries of the
Christian faith"? So Washington Irving says, and so I once believed,
with glowing heart and throbbing brow as I read how "this most Christian
knight and discreet ambassador restrained himself within the limits of
lofty gravity, leaning on the pommel of his sword and looking down with
ineffable scorn upon the weak casuists around him. The quick and subtle
Arabian witlings redoubled their light attacks on the stately Spaniard,
but when one of them, of the race of the Abencerrages dared to question,
with a sneer, the immaculate conception of the blessed Virgin, the
Catholic knight could no longer restrain his ire. Elevating his voice
of a sudden, he told the infidel he lied, and raising his arm at the
same time he smote him on the head with his sheathed sword.
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